I may get defederated, and that’s ok

Firstly, just to make this completely clear:

I want to be an ally of LGBTQIA+ people. I oppose any form of harassment and stalking. I hate racism and most other forms of -isms.

Even with that, I am still at risk of being banned and/or blocked, or de-federated.

This is a fear that I will have to come to terms with.

I strive to always be good, supportive, and compassionate.

Even so, my secondary account on mastodon.sdf.org got deleted with no warning. It was mostly a passive account with one or two posts. Nothing even remotely controversial. Maybe SDF simply doesn't allow secondary accounts. I'll probably never know why it got deleted.

Recently, there have been a couple of cases where instances got de-federated for not acting harshly enough against bad actors (nazis, harassers, or other generally unpleasant people).

Someone else mentioned that Mastodon is a feudal media where local moderators rule. This is a good thing. Actual humans reading posts and reacting will always be better than algorithmic moderation.

Small communities of like-minded people come together in Mastodon instances where their moderators do their best to ensure that the content they are exposed to matches their expectations is probably the best result we can hope for.

But there is a risk of human error. Someone might have a knee-jerk reaction, and suddenly I am cut off from thousands or hundreds of thousands of people.

As a single-user mastodon instance maintainer, the impact of defederation is huge on me, but near-nonexistent for the large instance which defederated me.

This will always be an issue for me and all the other single-user instances.

If you're a self-hosting Mastodon user, like me, with a bit of imposter syndrome and FOMO, just know that you're not alone.

All we can do is be good, form a network of friendly people around us, and hope that moderators don't cut us off from our friends.

There is a thread about this post on Mastodon.